06-03-09 by dugan
The investigative journalists of the nonprofit ProPublica are dogged (and mostly alone these days) in following the oil industry’s push to get natural gas out of shale. How do they do that? With unregulated "hydraulic fracturing, a process in which water and chemicals are pumped underground at high pressure." Now that the chemicals are polluting underground water, shouldn’t this be federally regulated for safety? Naw, says the petroleum lobby. We know it’s safe.
Today’s
ProPublica story, on Congressional efforts to put some regulation on
this growing natural gas drilling technique, describes a conference
call between reporters and the American Petroleum Institute, the industry
lobby in Washington:
"The institute says state regulations are sufficient to keep water
supplies safe and that returning authority to the Environmental
Protection Agency – which the bill sponsored by Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) and Maurice Hinchey
(D-NY) would do – amounts to a cumbersome additional layer of
regulation. The API repeatedly referenced a recent study claiming that
federal oversight of the drilling process would cost the industry more
than $100,000 per new well and threatened that thousands of jobs would
be lost if tougher regulation was passed. It maintains that fracturing
has been used reliably for over 50 years, and that it’s a safe
technology proven not to harm water. [emphasis added]"
Then a reporter (probably the ProPublica author, Abrahm Lustgarten) had the temerity to ask a question:
"Asked what recent scientific studies support that notion, however, the
institute’s senior policy analyst, Richard Ranger, answered: ‘That’s a
good question. I’m not aware of any.’
Ouch. Mr. Ranger obviously missed the lobbyist obfuscation lessons.
I
don’t know who wrote the 2005 legislation exempting hydraulic fracture
from EPA regulation, but I’m willing to bet Dick Cheney’s office
had a hand in it. His home state is natural gas producer Wyoming, where
environmentalists are in a tough fight over similar and equally
polluting extraction of natural gas from coalbeds.
So
when some billionaire like T. Boone Pickens tells you that natural gas
is the clean automotive fuel of the future, come back and read the
ProPublica series. That’s where much of the necessary "new" natural gas
will be coming from. For the better alternatives, read Consumer
Watchdog’s "Road to Cleaner and Cheaper," on clean transportation that won’t break our budgets or depend on the fabrications of the API.